High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 593: Passion Struck with John R. Miles, Founder and CEO of Passion Struck

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

John R. Miles is a leading authority on intentional behavior change, personal growth, and mattering. He is a keynote speaker, author, top-rated show host, and the founder and CEO of Passion Struck®.�� His award-winning podcast, Passion Struck with John R. Miles, consistently ranks among the world’s top 100 shows and the #1 Alternative Health podcast.  Recognized as one of the top thinkers in personal mastery and a Premier 100 Leader, his influence extends far and wide. With over two decades of corporate and military leadership experience, he’s the trusted advisor sought after by some of the world’s most prominent companies and visionary entrepreneurs.  Yet, beneath these remarkable achievements, John’s true passion lies in guiding individuals to live a passion-struck life in every facet.    In this podcast, John and Cindra talk about: What it means to be passion struck  12 principles to unlock purpose  Why intentionality, passion, and intrinsic motivation are important  Strategies to decrease anxiety and fear   HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: www.cindrakamphoff.com/593 TO PREORDER JOHN’S BOOK: https://passionstruck.com/passion-struck-book/ FOLLOW SIGN UP FOR THE FREE MENTAL BREAKTHROUGH CALL WITH CINDRA’S TEAM: https://mentallystronginstitute.com/freecall/ TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MENTALLY STRONG INSTITUTE: https://mentallystronginstitute.com/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON X: https://twitter.com/mentally_strong Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/high-performance-mindset-learn-from-world-class-leaders/id1034819901

Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Dr. Sindra Kampoff, and thank you so much for being here today. I am the founder of the Mentally Strong Institute, where we help purpose-driven leaders and athletes play big and achieve their most audacious goals. And I know you're here because you want to start 2024 with a bang, so we invite you to sign up for a free coaching call with one of my team members at freementalbreakthroughcall.com. It's free, no strings attached, just to continue to help you think like a high performer. So if you'd like to achieve your goals quicker, up-level your confidence, and increase your influence, please visit freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for

your free mental breakthrough call. Now today's episode I have John R. Miles on the podcast. He's a leading authority on intentional behavior change, personal growth, and mattering. He is a keynote speaker, author, and a top-rated show host, also the founder and CEO of PassionStruck. And I first heard of John through his award-winning podcast called PassionStruck with John R. Miles, which consistently ranks among the world's top 100 shows and is the number one alternative health podcast. And today what John and I talk about is how to live a passion struck life in every facet of your life. So we talk about what it actually means to be passion struck. He shares his 12 principles to unlock purpose and passion, which is the focus of his upcoming book launched early February called Passion Struck. We talk about intentionality,

passion, and intrinsic motivation, why those are important, and that they are really his three pillars. And we also talk about strategies to decrease anxiety and fear. If you'd like to see the full show notes and description of this interview, I'm going to encourage you to check out syndracampoff.com slash 593 for episode 593. And if you haven't already, wherever you're listening, please leave us a rating and review. This just helps us reach more and more people each and every week and we would be so forever grateful. So wherever you're listening, if you're listening, for example, on the iPhone, you can just scroll up and leave us a five-star rating there and any comments you'd like. All right, well, let's bring on John. John, thank you so much for being on the High Performance Mindset podcast.

I'm really excited to talk to you about passion and your new book, Passion Struck, that's coming out relatively shortly along with your podcast. So thanks so much for being on the podcast today. I'm grateful that you're here. Well, I'm so honored that you invited me and you have done such an incredible job, 600 plus episodes. Congratulations to you as well. Yeah. It takes a lot of grit, doesn't it? To produce a podcast for that long, just like you have almost 400. So we're both in the grind and also the power of positively impacting people with words is really incredible. So thanks so much for being on. And I thought,

maybe let's just get started and tell us a little bit about what you're passionate about. Yeah, I am passionate about helping people realize their inherent worth and to help them live the life that they've always aspired to live. That's the main mission that PassionStruck is all about. And it's really done through the power of how do you live your life intentionally? Excellent. So there's so many things we can dive into there. What do you mean by living life intentionally and what does that mean to you? Yeah, well, you started off by talking about it takes a lot of grit to be a podcaster. That was one of the starting points for me is I'm a huge fan of Angela Duckworth

and have always loved her book, RIT. And it meant a lot to me because for those who have read it, she starts it out by analyzing cadets at West Point. And I happen to go to the Naval Academy. So as I was looking at it, I have firsthand experience of understanding what it took to get through. And I think she rightfully says that passion and perseverance are absolutely critical to graduating, to get, getting through plebe summer. But when I looked at it, I thought that there was a missing two missing ingredients, um, on what i would think of as a triangle one of them is an additional side which is intentionality and where this factors in is you can have all the grit in the world that you want yeah but if you're making choices that are taking you away

from where you desire to be that to me is being unintentional. Whereas if you are making different choices that align with your core values, align with your long-term goals, that's being intentional. But knowing when you're off course and the need to change, that's when intentionality comes into play. And then the other missing element to me is intrinsic motivation, which is what fuels the entire cycle of passion, perseverance, and intentionality towards a self-realized life. Yeah, I love that. My book, Beyond Grit, covers 10 practices of high performance, and grit is one of them. And so very similarly,

similarly, I've done a lot of reading and research on grit and what it is, what it isn't. I think sometimes people think that grit means grind, right? Like I just got to keep pushing, but I think that it's sustained excellence over time. And I think passion is part of that. I think it's hard for people to take a step back, think about what they're passionate about. It's like pulling off the layers of an onion to be able to understand passion. And so I'm curious, like the brand Passion Struck, your podcast name, your book, tell us like what, in your opinion, it means to be passion struck. So it's interesting how I ended up getting here because I, for much of my life would have considered myself to be passion struck. And then I hit a period kind of when I was at the apex of what most people would

have thought success meant where I achieved the opposite, just complete apathy and numbness and burnout and everything else. And I had realized that I had built myself and my life around the wrong metrics of success. I was chasing what so many of us, I think, learned to chase. And that's the fame, the accolades, the money, the recognition, all the things that come with it. And I think what ends up happening to us along that journey is we get so caught up into where we're at that it becomes harder and harder for us to pull ourselves away from it. And that inner voice that's there telling you that you're not doing the things that you're passionate about

keeps getting more and more quieted. So as I was coming out of that and kind of rebuilding where I wanted to take my life, I started to really do some deep-seated research on when you look at vanguards of industry or professional athletes or actors and actresses who've blown it out, politicians, why do some end up being able to hit home runs and others don't. It gets back to what Robin Sharma calls the 5%. Why are there these 5% that seem to be able to overachieve and 95% of us don't hit those goals? And so it culminated in me finding these 12 principles that we're going to talk about, but it was this underlying kind of life that they were leading where they were so driven by that passion and purpose that they had that they were willing to pursue it and do what it took to achieve it, regardless of the challenges

that were thrown in their way, the financial risk, the reputation risk. And I remember I was having this conversation with a friend of mine, Keith Crotch, former chairman and CEO of DocuSign. And as we were talking about it, he goes, man, it sounds like you're talking about someone going from stuck to becoming passion struck. And it just kind kind of it kind of hit me and I did the next logical thing I did a google search on it and the thing that came up was a victoria's secret uh perfume and that's awesome so I yeah so I said that's awesome and I'm like

there's no way in heck that this domain exists with them having a brand all about it. And it turns out it was right there available on GoDaddy. So to me, it was divine intervention and that this was the name I was supposed to carry forward. And I think it's a great one to describe what we're trying to teach people how to create. Yeah, I love it. I love that it's this moment of someone saying something to you and you're like, ding, right. Yeah, I love it. I love that. It's this moment of someone saying something to you and you're like, ding, right? And when I think about the opposite of passion struck, it's like apathy stuck, right? And so many of us know what it feels like to be stuck in our own way. And as I was listening, I was thinking about all the barriers that are in our way of living with passion and purpose. And I think one of those barriers you mentioned is self-doubt, you know,

our own inner critic, our own inner voice. I think there's also a lot coming at us and it can be easy to be distracted, focusing on the wrong thing at the wrong time or, you know, distracted by maybe what other people think that you should do instead of what your own passion and purpose really is. Yeah, that's how I open up the whole book. And to me, one of the most important quotes I've ever discovered was by Henry David Thoreau, where he says, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

And when you think about our fast driven success oriented society, the idea of living quiet desperation as Thoreau puts it is more prevalent now than ever, I think. And I, I think what it ends up leading is to so many of us doing what, just what you described, where it's as if we're in a masquerade that becomes our life and we're wearing this mask of pretense, hiding the true person we are. And when we do so, we end up in these, what I call portfolio jobs that lack fulfillment.

We spend our days in monotonous loop of meetings, emails, presentations, serving others rather than creating the dreams that we want for ourselves and serving others with the gifts that we have. Yeah, that's where that intentionality piece comes in. So let's dive into your book. It's going to be out February 6th. So you got to make sure to let us know by the end how we can get that book and where you should direct us to get it. But I'd like to talk about the principles that you have within your book. And the subtitle is 12 Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Life. So where should we get started as we're thinking

about these principles? I think I would start with, let me orient people into how the book is, is how I created the book. So what I tried to do as I approach this, as I have these 12 principles that, as I mentioned before, came from examining 700 people who've utilized them, um, through the work that I've examined. And so in each chapter, I try to lay out a concept or a principle. I then double down in the science behind it, either through positive psychology or behavior science. And then I give the principles of it and then try to give one or two examples of people who I studied or interviewed who have utilized it in their life. So that's how it's made up. But it's organized into the first section is mindset shifts. Second section is behavior shifts. And the third section is something that I call the psychology

of progress. And it's really about how do you take deliberate action? And if you take a step back on this, the mindset shifts are really the why. It's the why we're organizing our life the way we are. And they dictate the how. Your behavior shift is the what that's influenced by the how. And then the deliberate action or the psychology of progress is the what and the where. So I really go through the why, the what, and then how to deploy it through the what and the where. So if you look at a common starting point, it would be the first principle, which is, I call the mission angler. And the way I came up with these different chapters is they didn't start out with these names, but I wanted to give a reader a way that they could remember them.

And this chapter is really about a concept called life crafting. And when I think about life crafting, I think of the quote by Abraham Maslow that the story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short. And it got me thinking, if you are an angler and I live down here in Tampa Bay and love to fish and you're going out into the Bay, into the Gulf to search for fish, it's not as if you get in your boat and you drive 20 miles to an undetermined location, drop the anchor, put your lines in and hope you're going to catch fish. Most successful fishermen that I know are doing a lot of preparation. They're looking at tides, what fish are in season, where their typical points are that you will find them. But the crazy thing is, is we

don't live our lives like that. And so many of us don't approach our life by crafting in a way that we want our future self to become. And so that's what this chapter is about, is the active process that entails reflecting on your present and future life, setting crucial goals in areas like relationships, career well-being, and then taking concrete steps once you find that underlying problem or purpose that you want to craft your life around to pursue it. And a great metaphor that I like to use to complement this is when I was at that point that I was talking about my own career, I ended up going to seek professional help. And I worked with a career coach who was also a psychologist who, after hearing what I was feeling and going through, said, John, I want you to just close your mind and we're going to do some visualization. And I

want you to just picture a kitchen stool and imagine yourself sitting on it. He goes, now, I want you to imagine that underneath that stool, you only have one big support that's holding you up. And I got that in my mind. And he goes, well, for you, that is the constant grind that you've been allowing yourself to live in. And you've been ignoring other elements of your life. And I want you to visualize what happens now once that grind starts getting the best of you and you're feeling like you are. And I said, well, you start to topple over. And he said, exactly right. And then he said, now I want you to picture your future self in a different way. Picture that same stool, but underneath it, put four or five pillars, support structures underneath it. And they can be anything you want, but imagine creating a better balanced life that you craft for yourself. And the answer can be different for anyone who's listening. But for me, I ended up picking relationship health, physical health, emotional health, mental health, spiritual health as the pillars that I wanted to concentrate on. And then I used them to help me rebuild a more balanced life, which as I was doing that, it culminated in me doing a lot more

me search, which over time ended up evolving into me finding what my deep seated purpose was, who I was supposed to help, kind of my one word problem that you're aware of and going from there to creating what I'm doing now. So that's really what this whole chapter is about. And in it, I cover two people that many of the listeners may know. One is Gary Vee and the other is Jim Kelvey who founded Square with Jack Dorsey. Wow, cool.

Well, I appreciate hearing a little bit about your story and appreciate the stool. And I was just thinking about the importance of having, you know, one area can be really out of balance. And I think for a lot of the listeners who are high performers, they're really focused on their career and their goals or their sport. Right. And it's easy to let all these other areas that are important to well-being kind of fall to the wayside. I'm curious, John, when you say like life crafting, which I think this is perfect to talk about at the beginning of the year, right? Like how do you craft your life? How do you craft this year? I heard you say kind of three things we should do.

Reflect on where we are, are set goals and then you said like take concrete steps to do that can you give the listeners um you know like okay how what's the first step in crafting this this life that we really want and how would you tell us to go about doing that i think the biggest mistake that we all run into, especially around this time of the year, and I know it's something that as I started out, I was running into this mistake again and again, is we try to make our aspirations too lofty for which we try to pursue too many things, don't get the success that we want, and then stop them all. So what I encourage people to do is to have that big picture, but to break it down into much

smaller manageable goals that you can achieve. And so it depends on what area of your life that you want to focus on first. But to me, that's the key thing is to pick one area that you want to improve. So let's just take that that's physical health. Instead of getting into this huge thing where you say, I'm going to work out seven days a week, I'm going to do this, this, and this, and this, break it down to a much simpler objective that once you're done with it, you can look at the future self that you've become a week or two later and look back upon who you were before and the gains that you've made. So this may be instead of saying, I'm going to go to the gym all these times. It could be as simple as I'm going to start a walking routine. And the first day I'm going to walk a mile.

And then you start building up from there, setting a time that you do it so that you get in the routine of doing it. And what I have found is once you start working on one area of your life, you end up improving other areas of your life almost subconsciously. And it can really any place you pick can be the starting point. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. And I feel like that happens to me too. When I, for example, have my eating dialed in, it's like my mindset's more dialed in,

my productivity is more dialed in, right? It's like I hear what you're saying. Tell us a bit about the reflection part. As people are thinking about crafting their life, what's helpful to think about? How should we reflect on the past, in your opinion, and where we are right now? Is there anything else you want to say about that before we move on to another principle besides the mission angler? Yeah. So one of the things when you think about habits

is that it comprises of three things. There's the trigger, the behavior, and the result. So where self-reflection really comes in is on the tail end of that. So once you've executed the behavior you want to start changing, I think what so many of us fail to do is to measure that improvement, to really look at that result and reflect on the progress you've made or not made and really think about how you want to renew that as you move forward into the next step. And this is something that is so critical. I have a process in the book I call the deliberate action process. But throughout this process, which includes assessing, prioritizing, igniting, executing, measuring, and renewing, those are the six steps.

The two that most often fail by the wayside are measuring, understanding the gains that you've made and then renewing, like using that to renew your next iteration of you that you want to become. So to me, that's the importance of reflection. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you for sharing that. Hi, this is Cinder Campoff and thanks for listening to the High Performance Mindset. Did you know that the ideas we share in the show are things we actually specialize in implementing? If you want to become mentally stronger, lead your team more effectively, and get to your goals quicker, visit freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call with one of our certified coaches. Again, that's freementalbreakthroughcall.com

to sign up for your free call. Talk to you soon. One of your, if I have this right, are one of your principles related to fear? Yeah, I have one that's called the fear confronter. That's what I thought. Let's go there next, if that sounds good to you, because I think that it's one of the barriers I see working with people one on one is, you know, that we let fear get in our way of really finding what our passion and purpose is and behavior scientist at the University of Michigan. And he has a book called Chatter, which is really about the negative thought loops that we allow to invade our lives. And I picked this concept of the fear confronter because I think a lot of us feel like we're this high, we see high achievers. We see these people who seem to be accomplishing it all and we think they

have it all together. And what you don't realize is that these folks have as much, if not more self-doubt fear, imposter syndrome as any of the rest of us, what they just are able to do differently is they control it. They're able to overcome that fear and use it as a powerful weapon instead of it being a weakness. And so to me, this really gets back again to reflection that we were just talking about, because that introspection is such a powerful tool to use to overcome these fears.

And a concept I like to talk about here, because I love metaphors, is the idea that so many of us become visionary arsonists. We have these huge visions, these amazing goals that we set out that we want to accomplish. And you see this happen in companies all the time where you see a company has this project or product that they want to launch and they start going after it with so much enthusiasm. They put this A team on it. And then what happens over time

is different priorities come up. It starts becoming a secondary or a third priority. People get moved off the project. They lose their focus. And all of a sudden, they're doing all these things that arson the very success. And we do the same things when we let fear and self-doubt and other things impact us. So one of the people I talk about in this chapter is a woman named Christy Ennis. And Christy, if you're not familiar with her, is a former Marine Sergeant. She happened to be on her last deployment in Afghanistan on the last day, went out on a mission in the helicopter that she was a crew of.

And unfortunately, they ended up crashing. And coming out of it, she had terrible injuries, including the loss of limbs. And if you look at where she was up until that point, here she is completely, her life has changed with everything to do with it has changed and she's got a choice. Am I going to face the future with all these doubts and fears about what I can accomplish or am I going to create for myself an attitude that anything is possible? And it's in those steps of creating that life that anything is possible that led her to the aspiration that she wanted to climb the seven tallest peaks.

And she's now done six of the seven. She's still trying to climb Everest. She's attempted twice. She needs to do it this one last time. But it just shows you that your mind can play such a pivotal role when you learn how to confront these fears rather than having them control you. Absolutely. And I completely agree, John, that people that we might perceive have it all together. They experience self-doubt and fear and imposter syndrome just like you and I do, you know. And I know this because I work with people one-on-one and it might be professional athletes or high level executives, like leaders, right? And the cool thing is a coach, people really tell you what's getting in their way. And it's part of human experience to experience self-doubt and fear.

I had a sports psychologist who does some incredible work in Canada named J.F. Menard on my podcast a while ago. And he had this phrase that I love. And he said, you know, the world's best are not fearless. They just fear less. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about is, you know, fear is going to be there when we're really pushing ourselves to try something new and to get outside of our comfort zone. But can we work to control it and can we work to channel it? And what have you seen in terms of some of the best and maybe the people you've interviewed or, you know, people that you've researched or worked with, how do they do that in your opinion? Yeah, I'm going to use an example from someone I interviewed as well. I interviewed a gentleman named Nate Kinzer who wrote The Confident Mind and he's been teaching at this point for 25 years. I know Nate Kinzer. I had him on the podcast actually and I love love his book. Yeah. Yeah.

Good guy. So I think, I think he gives some great advice on how to, how to do this. And I'm just going to use, um, one of the Manning brothers, Eli Manning to describe the story. And,

um, Eli, when he started working with Nate, um, was an NFL quarterback, but he wasn't an elite quarterback. He had self-doubt. He had tons of fear.

He didn't think he believed he believed he was an imposter. He didn't believe that he really belonged in that New York Giants uniform. And so the way that Nate started to get him to have self-confidence was pretty unique. He had him start looking at all this tape, but instead of looking at all the moments when he had failed, he told him to throw all that away and instead only look at the tape of seeing yourself succeed. I mean, you might've lost a game, but if you threw eight great passes in it, start picturing yourself doing that again and again.

Start picturing yourself and how you handed the ball off or the plays that you called. And by starting to practice this visualization tool of imagining himself where he wanted to be, a year later, you fast forward and he ends up winning the Super Bowl and the rest is history and it's completely changed how he's looked at things. But we can do the same thing that Nate talked about with him in our own lives. I think we are so self-critical about the mistakes we've made, about our weaknesses, that we don't analyze our strengths enough and the moments that we performed at our peak and then double down on them.

Because when you start thinking about what I call your reverse bucket list, which is all the things that you never thought in life that you would be able to accomplish that you've already conquered, it gives you so much confidence to overcome these self-doubts and these negative thought loops that are impacting

you and it allows you to move forward. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for sharing that example. I think that's a really powerful example. And I think that confidence is a decision that we make every day to build confidence. And it can be something that can waver a lot, you know, based on how we take in what people say to us, our sort of failures or the times that we make mistakes. And I appreciate what you said about looking back at your past accomplishments. What have you achieved? It's one of the research-backed ways to grow confidence, but we don't do that. I think because of our negativity bias, we're looking at the things that are wrong or are missing more frequently. Excellent. I know we don't have enough time to go through all of these 12 principles. So is there another principle that you're passionate about and you think would be really helpful for the audience to learn more about? Yeah, I think I will give you a couple that we could go through. One would be the anxiety

optimizer, which is how you can transform nervous energy into productive fuel. Another one is the Gardner leader, which is a new leadership style that I'm advocating for that I think fits the world that we're in today. Or the last one I could talk about is the conscious engager, which is really about the power of unwavering focus. Oh, so, so good. Let's go to the anxiety optimizer because I think that anxiety can be something that a lot of people feel and can be really helpful for the listeners, particularly like anxiety, pressure, you know, especially when things are really important to you. Yeah, I think this is one of my favorite chapters in the book, and it's one of my favorites

because I used a friend of mine, Mark Devine, who people might know. He's got an incredible podcast, but he's known for being a Navy SEAL and having an unbreakable mind. And I just want to take the listeners through one of the most famous SEAL missions that there was. This is the Operation Neptune Spear, because I think it's a great example of using this anxiety optimizer principle in your life. So when you think of SEALs as I do, I think of them as kind of the epitome of resilience and courage. They have to face fear every single day that would send shivers down the spines of the bravest people. And they have to go into battle far from home,

relying on just a handful of teammates. Well, the reality is, is that the SEALs learn how to confront this anxiety and to use it not as something that is hindering them, but propelling them forward. And in this interview that I did with Mark, he talks about how he got through Bud's training, not only getting through it, but as the honor man and the first person who ever guided their entire boat squad to all graduate. And he came up with that.

He found in the way that he did it, that there were four important things that he learned how to do and taught his men how to do. And that was proper breath control, positive internal dialogue, imagery, and learning how to perfect targeted focus. And so if you break those things down, when you're feeling anxious and things are hitting you and you're at that moment, using practices like box breathing is the simplest one that comes to mind where you're using that to recenter yourself

and how you're using your breath to control your feelings is extremely important, as is having that positive internal dialogue with yourself of how are you letting that anxiety hit you? Are you letting it engulf you, or are you letting this be a positive fuel in your life? And then it gets to imagery, which is how do you see yourself using this energy to propel yourself forward and then having that targeted focus to allow yourself to get there. So to think about this, imagine that you're walking a tightrope.

On one side lies overwhelming fear and on the other is complacency. And in between is a state of equilibrium where you reach your peak performance, that sweet spot where your optimal zone of flow peaks and time flies by. And I think a lot of us have probably felt this because it's that moment, if you've ever played baseball or softball, that you see a pitch coming at you and it could be going 95 miles per hour, but it's as if that pitch is moving in slow motion

and you're just able to hit it. This whole chapter is about how do you find how to get yourself in that state that I call of being on the edge without going over the edge more frequently. And it's interesting because the research that I looked at from McKenzie found that executives who are able to get themselves into these more consistent states of optimal anxiety can do as much in two hours worth of work as the rest of us do in eight hours of a typical day. And it's one of the biggest things that I found that allows people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or The Rock, Gary V, to perform at the level that they're at is because they learn how

to train themselves, how to get into the zone of peak performance where they're able to do so much more work in a more concentrated period of time. Yeah, absolutely. I want to share a study and then I have a question for you john so i was as i was thinking about navy seals and buds training right um there's a study that is summarized in kelly mcgonigal's book about stress and she shares a study about buds training and what they found is those people who went through buds training right those who ended up becoming a Navy SEAL saw anxiety as performance enhancing and saw stress as performance enhancing instead of performance debilitating. So I think it's very similar to what you said. And the way I think about that is how we see anxiety, how we interpret

it, right? And anxiety and energy and excitement is actually the same, feels the same in our body, right? It's all about our interpretation around it. And so if we can see it as performance enhancing, like helping us, I think that's one way that we can think like a Navy SEAL. And I was just thinking about that as I was listening to you and these four parts about that Mark shared with his other SEALs. Yes, because you've got to have some, I mean, he used those four mechanisms. I've done a lot of research with Stephen Kotler as well, who approaches it in a slightly different way.

But the important thing is you've got to find those things that work for you. I think for what the SEALs do, what Mark came up with, and what I got trained in when I was assigned to a SEAL team, definitely helped you to understand in that life or death mission how you use those things to turn that in that stress that you were talking about into a powerful ally. I think the other thing that I really learned from my time with the SEAL teams is that trying times end. And if you start thinking about obstacles that get in your way or adversity that you face, and you look at it more as a rubber band that expands and contracts,

and you have that mindset that right now I am facing a trying time, and I do have all this anxiety built up about having to face it, if you start to calm yourself down by using that positive imagery that it's like a rubber band and it's time restricted, it gives you a in the moment, but you know that it's going to end and that propels you to give more of yourself to the activity because you can know you can get through it. Same thing applies in anything that we want to conquer. Excellent.

Well, with the time we have left, tell us a little bit about Gardner Leader and why you think that's the new way of leadership. Just tell us a little bit about that before we close. So I think I was like many people who grew up, especially being trained in the military, as a servant leader. And I think that the servant leader has had its place. And it's been an extremely powerful leadership discipline. And I don't want to disregard that fact because it's something that I use successfully in so much of my life. But I think in the times that we're in now, where more and more of us are going to find

ourselves having to work remote, we're going to have to manage more people who are not within our daily arm's length that we can influence. We need to figure out how do you start leading with intention? And so really what this is about is how do you grow your influence like a gardener nurtures a garden? And it's all around this concept of how do you become eyes on, but hands off? Because if you think about it, we really need to be hands on in certain aspects of what we're trying to do as a leader.

I mean, you need to be hands on in equipping your teams with the strategy that they need to have to execute the big picture. You need to equip them with the training and tools in order to do their job better. You need to equip them with gratitude and thankfulness for the job that they're doing. However, it's next to impossible if you've got employees in India or you're one of those SEAL teams where they're doing a mission in a foreign country 3,500 miles away for that commanding general to be sitting there micromanaging what they're doing because they have no idea what's

really going on in the moments that that mission has taken place. And the same goes with so much of the life we're leading right now. So that's where this eyes on hands off really comes into play. And it's got five very important elements. The first is delegating to the right level. The second is effectively hiring for your weaknesses. The third is becoming what I call ambitious. The fourth is putting the team first at all costs. And the fifth is inspiring the colleagues through a noble mission or a passion-struck mission. And so those are the different elements of what it means to be a gardener leader. And this was a really fun chapter to write because I use General McChrystal and Keith Crotch, who I mentioned earlier, who also happen to be very good friends.

But they both have kind of perfected this leadership style, one from a military standpoint and another from an entrepreneurial standpoint. And both have just achieved unparalleled results using it. Well, excellent. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. And I love the analogy of a garden and creating your leadership and being really intentional with your leadership in that way. Eyes on, hands off.

Very sticky. John, thank you so much for delivering so much value today in our podcast. And I know that there's so many things people got from it. There's so many ideas that you shared. So I'm really grateful for that. And you got to pick up John's book, comes out February 6, Passion Struck. Tell us where we can get the book and how we can continue to learn from you, if it's the podcast or other ways. Yeah, so you can pick up the book now on pre-order anywhere where you want to purchase books, whether that's Amazon, Walmart, or your indie bookstore through their web of stores as well.

But the important thing is once you do, if you do it during the pre-order time, I've created five or six incredible takeaways that I'm gifting to my community as a thank you for buying the book. And two of these are incredible e-books. One is how to create intrinsic motivation for yourself and how you lead teams. Another one is,

I mentioned the deliberate action process. I touch on it at a very high level in the book, but I am actually giving away a 60, 70 page e-book that goes through not only how to use the process at a high level, but really how to break it down into its most concrete steps. I also have a master course on how do you create your passion and the steps to do it. Plus you get an early access to chapter one of the book. So once you buy the book, you come back to passionstruck.com forward slash passionstruck book, enter your information into our form and we'll send you those different artifacts.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. And you got to check out John's podcast, Passion Struck. Thank you so much for being here. I'm grateful that you spent some time with us and we could learn from you. Well, Sandra, thank you so much for being here. I'm grateful that you spent some time with us and we could learn from you. Well, Cinder, thank you so much for having me. It was just an honor to be here. Way to go for finishing another episode of the high performance mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow. Did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindhra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers

where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindhra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.